So, I know that I'm late on keeping up with the plan to post a chapter from the bible each week. Work and other parts of my life became hectic since the last post and this is the first time I've gotten the oppertunity and energy to make another post.
I have since joined a group for atheists and other sceptics in the Ashland region, and though it's a small group at the moment it's nice to know that there are at least some in this region that have decided that religion and the god idea is not for them. And with that in mind, I wanted to post how I went from believer to non-believer.
I was raised in a strong Baptist family. Not necessarily a fundamentalist home but one with a strong emphasis placed on religion. The bible was discussed fairly frequently, though in no great detail beyond the generalities of "god is love" and "god is great" and etc, etc.
As I grew up, I remember going to church with my family and taking part in the usual activities of summer vacation camps and food drives and the like. The preacher's wife at the time was more fundamental than my family and so always seemed a bit more intense than I was used to. Around the time I was 8 or 9, I was very interested in dinosaurs and archeaology and thus was beginning to take an interest in things scientific. One day in Sunday school the preacher's wife made the comment that there was no such as dinosaurs because there was no mention of them in the bible. When I asked about the dinosaurs bones that were in museums, she said they were the bones of giants mentioned in genesis and not of prehistoric animals. That was about the time that I started to have doubts about the whole church thing.
But I stayed with it, even made a profession of faith and was baptized at the age of 12. I thought it was a genuine feeling of god in my heart at the time, and I read through parts of the bible that I was able to understand. Which wasn't much since I was taught at church that the only version that I should read was the King James version, which is not exactly easy reading for a 12 year old. But I pushed through and tried to understand the book from cover to cover.
When I hit high school, I started to really develop my interest in science. Particularly the areas of physics and cosmology, but chemistry and biology was up there on the list as well. Needless to say, as I learned more about science, the bible began to make less sense in a literalist sense. The stories of creation, the story of the global flood and everything else in just the first book alone was enough to make my head hurt in trying to reconcile what was supposedly divinely inspired.
By the time I graduated high school, I was more of a deist than baptist, though I didn't know that term at the time. I accepted the idea of a god existing and putting the world in motion but then having no active role in the day to day affairs of people. There was just too many disasters in the world, too much famine in the world and health crisis for me to believe that a loving, all-powerful and all-knowing deity existed. In addition, why would a loving god allow so many children to starve in Africa and Asia while so many evangelicals on TV were preaching the "prosperity doctrine" that if you just sent them $20 then god would bless you and make you a millionare that could also defraud the government tax agencies.
I went to college at Morehead State University and got my first real exposure to alternative religions. Around home, it was primarily baptists of some denomination with a few methodist churches in town. The most "radical" group that we had in the area at that time was a group of jehovah's witnesses. These days, we've branched out a bit and have church of christ, church of god (which I know nothing about to be honest), and even have a catholic church. Go us, I suppose. Anyway, I spent time at the student methodist group, the student baptists and student bible group, all trying to reconnect to what I thought was missing in my life.
I spent a semester at that, and as part of that goal I started to read the bible from cover to cover for the first time that I could actually understand the words. I made it through Exodus and had to stop because I couldn't handle anymore. Finding passages that endorsed slavery, human sacrifices, genocide and other crimes that would get a person today thrown into prison for the rest of their lives, and were encouraged as being good and godly behavior. It was also at this time that I came to believe that the god in the old testament was an old bronze age war god, similiar to the god Ares/Mars in the Greco-Roman pantheon, but that's a subject for another post. Regardless, by the time I left college I was considering myself an agnostic.
I was fairly certain that there was no god at that point, but I wasn't convinced enough that I was ready to say for certain "There is no god." So I morphed again and began to call myself an agnostic. I believe that the universe was created through an inpersonal agent and followed the laws of physics, but I was willing to entertain the idea that a god may have been involved and that I was wrong on the inpersonal aspect. But as I read further in science journals and researched the matter on my own, I began to realize that there was really no need for a god in any of the aspects that were out in the world.
There are thousands of gods in the world, and in christianity alone there are 13,000+ denominations. Yet they all supposedly have the sole version of the Truth and the other 12,999 are false and decieved. And that's not counting Islam or the various Asiatic philosophy/religions such as buddism, hinduism, confusionism and the like. Which god you follow is primarily a matter of geography and family tradition. If I had been born in say India, then I would likely have been brought up as a hindu, possibly a muslim depending on which part of the country I was born in. If I was born in Iraq, I would have been a muslim of some variety. And all of them share commonalities. They all make appeals to supernatural agents that are said to impact the world and yet are seperate from the world. That doesn't work though, as any science experiment will tell you. If you impact something, you leave evidence behind that you were there. The same would apply to a god interacting with our world.
And that is why I now consider myself an atheist. I will say that I believe there is no gods, though I am not to the point of saying that I know there is no gods. But based on the claims and evidence presented thus far, I cannot take seriously any religion's claim of a divine agent being involved in our world in any shape or fashion.
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